What We See When We Read

OPENINGS

When I read, I withdraw from the phenomenal world. I turn my attention “inward.” Paradoxically, I turn outward toward the book I am holding, and, as if the book were a mirror, I feel as though I am looking inward. (This idea of a mirror is an analogy for the act of reading. And I can imagine other analogies as well: For instance, I can imagine reading is like withdrawing to a cloister behind my eyes—an open court, hemmed by a covered path; a fountain, a tree—a place of contemplation. But this is not what I see when I read. I don’t see a cloister, or a mirror. What I see when I’m reading is not the act of reading itself, nor do I see analogies for the act of reading.)

When I read, my retirement from the phenomenal world is undertaken too quickly to notice. The world in front of me and the world “inside” me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection of these two domains—or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them.

When my eyes are closed, the seen (the aurora borealis of my inner lids) and the imagined (say, an image of Anna Karenina) are never more than a volitional flick away from each other. Reading is like this closed-eye world—and reading takes place behind lids of a sort. An open book acts as a blind—its boards and pages shut out the world’s clamorous stimuli and encourage the imagination.

The openings of To the Lighthouse and Moby-Dick are confusing for the reader—we haven’t yet been given sufficient information to begin processing the narrative and its imagery.

But we are used to such confusion. All books open in doubt and dislocation.

When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general—one is in

Italo Calvino describes this intermediacy…

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.

Bleak House opens in fog—and this fog is a component part of the world Charles Dickens has written into being.

The fog is also a reference to the “actual” fog of London.

This fog is also a metaphor for the English chancery court system.

I just used this same fog as a visual metaphor for the openings of books in general.

The only one of these fogs that is completely indecipherable to me is the visual effect, in fiction, of fog.